You see, Boss? You never needed a covenant of inflexible words. All you ever needed was self-respect, the self-worship which contains all of humankind and all the things that matter for your mutual immortality.
Pressing his hands to his head, Oakes rolled to his knees. He stared down at the sand, his eyes blurred by tears.
Slowly, Ship withdrew. It was a hot knife being pulled from Oakes' brain. It left an aching void. He lowered his hands and heard the crunch of many feet on sand. Turning, he saw a long line of people - E-clones and Naturals - approaching from the Redoubt. Legata and Lewis led them. Beyond the refugees, Oakes saw smoke drifting on a sea wind, billowing from the wreckage of the Redoubt. His precious sanctuary was being destroyed! Everything! All of Oakes' rage returned as he stumbled to his feet.
Damn You, Ship! You tricked me!
Oakes shook a fist at Legata. "You bitch, Legata!"
Lewis and Legata stopped about ten paces from Oakes. The refugees stopped behind them except for one tall E-clone female with fine features on a bulbous head. She stepped in front of Legata.
"You do not speak to her that way!" the E-clone shouted. "We have chosen her Ceepee. You do not speak to our Ceepee that way."
"That's crazy!" Oakes screamed it. "How can deformed monstrosities choose a Ceepee?"
The E-clone took a step toward Oakes, another. "Whom do you call monstrosity? What if we breed and breed here, and your kind becomes the freak?"
Oakes stared at her in horror.
"You ain't so pretty, you know," she said. "I look at me every day and every day I don't look so bad. But every day you get uglier and uglier. What if I don't think it's right for any more uglies to be born?"
Legata stepped forward and touched the woman's arm. "Enough."
As Legata spoke, a dark shadow flowed over them. They looked up to see Ship passing between Rega and the plain - far lower than Ship had ever been before. The odd protrusions and wing shapes of the agraria were clearly visible. The shadow moved with an awesome slowness, an eternity in the passage. When the shadow touched him, Lewis began to laugh. All who heard him turned toward Lewis and most of them were in time to see him vanish. He became a white blur which dissolved and left nothing where he had stood.
"Why, Ship?" Panille spoke it aloud, startled by the disappearance.
They all heard the answer, a joyous clamor in their heads.
You needed a real devil, Jesus Lewis, the other half of Me. The real devil always goes with Me. Thomas remained his own devi...special kind of demon, a goad. And now he knows. Humans, you have won your reprieve. You know how to worship.
In that instant, they all saw Ship's intentions toward Thomas, the issue hanging on a fragile balance.
Thomas raised himself on one elbow, resisting Hali's attempts to prevent it. "No, Ship," he muttered. "Not back to hyb. I'm home."
Legata intruded. "Let him go, Ship."
If you can save him, he is yours.
Ship's challenge rang through them.
Panille held fast to the awareness of Thomas and sent the call to Vata back in the medical shelter at the cliffs: Vata! Help us!
The old presence of Avata crept into his mind - attenuated but with nothing omitted. Vata was all of what had bee.... and more. Panille felt his daughter as the repository of those long eons when Avata had lived and learned, but welded now to everything human. She reached beyond the plain into the crew remaining aboard Ship, even into the dormant ones of hyb, giving them the new worship and weaving them into a single organism. They came together an awareness at a tim.... even Oakes. And when they were united, they moved threadlike into the flesh of Thomas, closing his wounds, repairing cells.
It was done and they left Thomas asleep on the litter.
Panille took a trembling breath and stared around him at the people on the plain. In the healing of Thomas, all of the wounded had been restored. There were bodies of the dead, but not a single maimed among the living. All stood silent under the shadow presence which slid across the plain.
Legata.
It was Ship again.
Still shaken by the experience of the sharing, she spoke aloud in a trembling voice. "Yes, Ship?"
You have taken My best friend, Legata. Oakes is Mine now, a fair exchange. Where I go, I will need him more than you. She looked up at the Rega-haloed outline. "You're leaving?"
I travel the Ox gate, Legata. The Ox gate - My childhood and My eternity.
She thought about the Ox gate, the scrambled repository in which she had found the truth about Oakes' origins, the near-mystical computer where hidden things emerged. As she thought this, she felt her own consciousness become one with Ship's records. And because they all were linked through Vata, all on the plain shared this.
Ship's words and images rode over this flooding awareness.
Infinite imagination has its infinite horrors, too. Poets turn their nightmares to words. With gods, dreams take on substance and lives of their own. Such things cannot be scratched out. The Ox gate, my morality factor. My psyche moves both ways. If it moves in symbols, it moves through the Ox. Some of my symbols walk and breathe - as it was with Jesus Lewis. Others sing in the words of poets.
Oakes fell to his knees, pleading. "Don't take me, Ship. I don't want to go."
But I need you, Morgan Oakes. I no longer have Thomas, my personal demon, and I need you.
Ship's shadow began to pass beyond the people on the plain. As light touched Oakes, he vanishe...white blur, then an empty place on the sand.
Legata stood there, looking at where Oakes had knelt, and she could not keep the tears from coursing down her cheeks.
Hali stood up beside the litter where her patient slept. She felt emptied and angry, robbed of her role. She stared up at the passing immensity of Ship.
Is this what I was supposed to let them know? she demanded.
Show them, Ekel!
Still angry, she played the images of the crucifixion, then: "Ship! Is that how it was with Yaisuah? Was he just another filament from one of Your dreams?"
Does it matter, Ekel? Is the lesson diminished because the history that moves you is fiction? The incident which you just shared is too important to be debated on the level of fact or fancy. Yaisuah lived. He was an ultimate essence of goodness. How could you learn such an essence without experiencing its opposite?
The shadow was gone from them, flowing away over the cliffs, carrying off the bits of humanity remaining up there - the Natali, the hyb attendants, the hydroponics worker....
"Ship is leaving us," Legata said. She crossed to Panille's side.
In the midst of her words, she felt the blaze of awareness which Ship had shared with them - Shiprecords, all of the pasts carried into the smallest cell on the plain.
"We've been weaned," Panille said. "We have to go it alone now."
Hali joined them. "No more shiptits."
"But alone has lost all of its old meanings," Panille said.
"Is this what the expansion of the universe is all about?" Legata asked. "The fleeing of the gods from their own handiwork?"
"Gods ask other questions," Panille said. He looked down at Hali. "You were midwife to us all when you brought us Vata and the Hill of Skulls."
"Vata brought herself," Hali said. She put a hand in Panille's. "Some things don't need a midwife."
"Or a Ceepee," Legata said. She grinned. "But it's a role we all know now." She shook her head. "I have only one question - What will Ship do with those people up there?"
She pointed upward at the vanishing ship.
They all heard it then, Ship's presence filling the people on the plain, then fading, but never to be forgotten.
Surprise Me, Holy Void!